Development Log Week 30

And just like that, we've spent 30 weeks working on Prosperous Universe. Time really does fly! This is what we've been up to this week:

Martin

In the beginning of the week, I was obviously busy setting up our website.

After that I actually had more time to work on Prosperous Universe than I had originally planned. So I used that to finally wrap up a milestone for my UI experiment: A proof-of-concept 3D component is now working with my UI prototype. You can set up several customized UI "screens" and switch between them. And last but not least, all UI state is now persisted on the server, so when you come back to the game, you'll find the UI as you left it. One side-effect of this is that UI state also gets "live synchronized" when you have the same screen open in different browser windows. More of a gimmick really and probably of minimal actual use, but pretty sweet nonetheless.

Michi

I finished another important step towards the faster than light (FTL) flight model this week.

Quick recap: If you want to fly to a distant system in Prosperous Universe you have to make a series of small jumps. After each jump the ship's engines have to be recharged (takes a while) and then the next jump can be made.

While recharging we want the player's ship to actually be within the system (and thus visible for other players), not just a pointer on the star map. So we decided that the ships would enter a random orbit around the sun in the target system. Figuring out how this could work was a bit tricky but I got it working this week. A bit more work is necessary on the 'random' part though. Right now the orbit is always between the second to last and last planet orbit which is kind of boring. Maybe the starting point of the orbit could depend on where the ship came from or something like that. Something to think about on the weekend!